Who cares if John Kasich wins Ohio?

Tuesday is yet another allegedly "super" primary day — the third so far, if you're keeping count. And this extra-super duper Tuesday is being billed as judgment day for John Kasich and Marco Rubio.

That's because every super day needs a narrative around which we in the media can organize our coverage. It isn't enough to talk about what the candidates are saying and doing, and then talk about the results; we need to have a story that builds to a climax.

I've long been a critic of this kind of expectations-based campaign coverage, which says that what matters isn't how candidates actually perform during a primary election, but how they performed relative to the expectations the press set for them. But arbitrary as it is, it does have real-world consequences, since those who don't meet expectations come under heavy pressure from not just the press but party leaders, donors, and supporters.

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So now we're being told that Rubio and Kasich's candidacies are on the line Tuesday. The former must win his home state of Florida — where polls currently show Rubio over 20 points behind Donald Trump — and the latter must win his home state of Ohio, where he and Trump are locked in a tight race.

For Rubio, who has been declining precipitously and hasn't come near meeting those pitiless expectations everyone had for him, the assumption is that if he loses Florida, he'll have nothing to look forward to and no reason to stay in the race. For Kasich, on the other hand, an Ohio win would propel him forward. As Chuck Todd said on Meet the Press this Sunday, "Obviously, a Kasich win there would keep him in the race and complicate Trump's efforts to win a majority of the delegates before the convention." But why is it obvious that Kasich ought to stay in the race if he wins his home state, but not if he wins somewhere else?

Or to put it another way: Who cares if John Kasich wins Ohio?

Once you ask the question, you realize it's hard to come up with an answer. Ohio is our seventh-most-populous state, two places behind Illinois, which votes on the same day. It would give Kasich his first win, but at this point, it's a little late for a first win. It would show that the people who know him best at least like him more than Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio, but again, so what? The people of Ohio don't get any more votes than anyone else. A delegate is a delegate, no matter where it comes from.

We have an expectation that presidential candidates ought to do well in their home states, but that's almost unfair to voters. Presumably, your average Republican in Ohio would vote for the person who's best for their party, the same as a Republican in California or Maryland, and not choose Kasich for no reason other than parochial loyalty. The flip side is that no rational voter would say, "Well, since John Kasich won Ohio, I think he might be just the kind of candidate I'm looking for."

To be clear, Kasich himself has fully bought into the story of how critical Ohio is. He's even said openly that if he doesn't win there, he'll pull out of the race. Unfortunately for him, right now it's all but mathematically impossible for him to become the Republican nominee by getting to 50 percent of the delegates in primaries — but that's true no matter what happens in Ohio. Nevertheless, he has every right to stay in the race as long as he likes, Ohio win or no Ohio win. He's hoping that if he's still a candidate to the end, he might have a chance of emerging from a contested convention. Which he might.

But if we were really being sensible, we'd acknowledge that in a national race, it doesn't really matter where you win votes and where you don't. Either you have the most votes or you don't. If the Republicans wind up at a contested convention, they'll be picking their nominee based on things like their assessments of each candidate's chances of winning a general election. How someone did against other Republicans in his home state ought to have little or no bearing on that judgment — nor on whether the press tells him to drop out.